Greetings:
I decided to reinstall due to major system faults that I didn't know how to
recover from. I have been dabbling with different distros for a solid month
now. Partitioning is new and dangerous territory for me but I'm not afraid
of living dangerously.

Found a very cool and lightweight partitioning live cd
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php that uses gnome. Using this disk
I first wiped out the partitions and had 12g unallocated space. Then
partitioned 9g to ext3, 2g to swap and the rest to unused. Once done I
noticed that the program showed that there was still data in the first
partition (yellow bar-key denotes data-forgot size).

Experimenting I then booted to this and found that the boot manager lilo was
still there. So with this I then used fdisk that I had from an old win95
boot disk. I deleted all the partitions and had 12g unallocated space,
booted and saw unable to boot medium string on the screen. Since win95
fdisk only partitions in dos I rebooted my live gnome partition cd and made
ext 9g partition, 2g swap partition, and the rest partitioned but not w/ any
file system.

I then booted my hard drive and sure enough there was lilo being all
powerful and defiant with graphics and all. It even tried to boot, showing
a picture of my little dog that I previously configd for non verbose loading
in the background, but came up with a kernel error and system froze.

Is it that data doesn't get erased until written over or does the boot
loader, and other files, reside someplace else? Is there a good way to
completly remove all data, boot loaders included? Does installing a new OS
overwrite all info if all space is used? I was quite shocked to see my
little dog covering my screen when I thought I deleted all info!